On nuclear pasts
and radiant futures
Logo: SALT.CLAY.ROCK.
Artistic research
and exhibition

Exhibition research display object 7: Bátaapáti aerial photo

24/12/12

This aerial photo shows the wooded area on the outskirts of Bátaapáti that was transformed to host a repository for low- and medium-level radioactive waste in the early 2000s. We received it from Csaba Szentpáll who currently works at the repository as a dosimetrist and uses this photo as his office desktop screensaver, a fond keepsake of his childhood memories of playing in these woods.

A photo of the area now occupied by the Bátaapáti. Source: From the computer desktop of Csaba Szentpáll, a dosimetrist at the Bátaapáti repository.

Many people in Bátaapáti tell us about how the current site of the repository used to be a beloved meeting place where locals came together around campfires on summer nights and young people organized open-air sleepovers. With little to do in the village in the evenings, some teenagers still go on walks there, even though it is a much less friendly place now with its barbed wire, high-security fences and generic architecture. But it does have one of the few well-lit roads; a small reminder of how basic public infrastructure is still lacking in rural places, which stands in stark contrast with the investment needed to build such a nuclear waste facility.

This image documents the changing temporality of a place, the memories, stories and emotions connected to it. But it not only looks back on the past, it also projects the future. After all, these radioactive waste repositories will once be sealed, their facilities dismantled and their sites returned to a greenfield—just like in the case of decommissioned nuclear power plants. Only warning signs invented by nuclear semioticians will communicate the hazards of the radioactive waste underground with future generations of humans and non-humans. Otherwise there will be no trace of the once-so-present nuclear infrastructures. It seems almost like a utopia that this place will be returned to what it once was, as if human intervention had never happened, as if nuclear energy production or radioactive waste management had not left any traces, except for the toxic waste packaged and hopefully permanently sealed from the living world, 250 meter below ground. Could it be really so simple to undo the consequences of our nuclear cultural heritage?